Files and scans

A file in The Margin always belongs to something: a card, a note, a whiteboard, a chat, a receipt on an expense. It is kept at its original quality, with no recompression, and it goes wherever the thing it is attached to goes.

Attach a file to a card#

Open the card and find Attachments. Attach file takes any kind of file up to 25 MB. Pictures show a small preview; everything else shows its name and size. Each row has a download button and a delete button.

Two more buttons appear on the right kind of file:

• On a picture, Annotate in a whiteboard opens a new whiteboard with the picture already on it, so you can draw arrows and circles over a screenshot or a floor plan. See Whiteboards and canvases.
• On a sound file, Transcribe to a note writes what was said into a note in your Inbox, filed against the card. See Talking instead of typing.

When a card has two or more pictures, the oldest and the newest sit side by side under Before / After, which is how a design request and the finished work end up next to each other.

Anyone who can edit the card can attach and delete. Someone with a view-only share can view and download them.

Pictures in a note#

Paste a screenshot into a note, drag a picture onto it, or type / and pick the image entry. The picture is stored as an attachment on the note and linked into the markdown at the cursor, so the note stays plain markdown and the link does not go stale. See Notes.

Files also arrive on their own: an email sent to your capture address brings its PDFs, pictures and office files into the Inbox with it, and a picture shared from another app on your phone lands there too. See The Inbox.

Scan paper into a PDF#

Scanning a letter or a form

1. Open quick capture (⌘⇧K) and press the scan icon beside the microphone, Scan a document. On the phone, tap Scan a document under Capture's title.
2. Take a photo of the first page, flat and in good light. Keep taking the next page until you have them all. Remove any page that came out badly.
3. Press Save as a PDF.

The pages become one PDF, in the order you took them, saved in your Inbox as a capture called "Scan" and the day's date. From there you file it like any other capture: keep it as a note, put it on a card, or add it to a note you already have.

A scan holds up to 20 pages. Each page is a JPEG or PNG photo of up to 8 MB, and the finished PDF has to fit the 25 MB file limit. On the phone you can also pick a page you already photographed with Choose a photo.

Find a picture or a file by a word in it#

On Pro, Family and Team, The Margin reads the words in every picture and PDF attached to a note, a card or a whiteboard, scans included. A school letter, a prescription, a photo of the whiteboard after a meeting: once it is read, you can find it by any word in it.

• Search. Type the word in the command panel (⌘K) or on the phone's search. Files whose words match show under Words in files, with a line of the matching text, and open on the note, card or whiteboard they belong to.
• The Mind. What a file says is remembered beside its name, so the Mind and Margin Intelligence can find it when you ask about the thing it mentions.
• Outside The Margin. A scan's PDF gets its words written into it as an invisible layer. Download it and any PDF viewer can search it and copy text from it.

Reading happens a moment after the upload, so the file is there at once and its words follow. It reads JPEG, PNG, WebP and GIF pictures and PDFs up to 8 MB. Pictures in chat and receipts on expenses are left out: a chat is a conversation, and a receipt has its own reader in Expenses and money.

Each file read uses a little of your plan's Margin Intelligence allowance. When the allowance has run out, the file is kept but not read.

On Free, a scan is still kept as a PDF and attachments work the same way; the words inside them are not read.

How much you can store#

Every file counts toward the workspace's storage, whatever it is attached to.

A trial gives 2 GB, unless a plan you already pay for gives more. One file can be up to 25 MB on every plan. When the storage is full, the upload is refused with a message that says so, and nothing you already stored is touched. Deleting files frees the space. See Plans and limits.

Offline#

Uploading a file needs a connection, because files are kept on our server and not in the database on your device. A file you have opened on a device before usually opens again there without signal. Everything else about the card or note works offline as normal. See Working offline.